Interconnects and non-believers

rvpiano,

Ok.  I just hope you can take my initial reply to you in the spirit it was given: mostly in jest. I'm not looking to get in to a cable debate in this thread. (I don't claim cables can't produce an audible difference, btw).

Fair enough.

Not sure what we're talking about here anymore but let's get back on topic...

Like I said before, there is not  boutique cabling inside your components.

Also, inside your amplifier there is a cable that goes to its binding posts. In your speaker, there is a cable that goes from its binding posts to the drivers.  Constructing speaker cable taken from the internal wiring of the Space Shuttle, for example,  will not "get out of the way of the music" as so many of you believe. 

Let's pretend for a moment that the wire inside your amplifier going to its binding posts, and your speaker cable, and then the wire inside your speaker going to the drivers, is one long straight piece of wire. You cannot cut out a middle section of this wire and replace it with some esoteric wire (speaker cable), and justify that it's not doing any harm to the signal. It's obviously changing the sonic signature of the signal. It's adding its own "flavor", if you will. 

Wouldn't it make sense that if you really wanted to hear what your components sounded like, then your interconnects would be the same wire that's inside of your components?

Something to ponder:

No matter how good the cable is that you use, you are never hearing anything "better" than the performance of the cables used in the recording.

And virtually none of the cables, especially for many of the most heralded audiophile classics, were "boutique" cables of the sort we see now. No cryogenic freezing, no cable risers, no specialized proprietary extruding techniques, no 99.99 percent oxygen free copper, no science-fiction-levels low electrical reactance...and all the other marketing. You are hearing the quality of the most basic cable the musical signals ever passed through on the way to being recorded (and mixed, and mastered, etc).

So think about it: every time you hear an advance in quality when you upgrade your cables, all the way up to the very best available in the world right now, every new revelation - those finger tips on the strings, that guy coughing in the 18th row, that incredible nuance in the natural reverb of the hall - all of that is a revelation about what those old non-boutique, non-audiophile, normally-priced cables used in recordings were able to pass along.  The most basic ones in the whole chain.

And then ask yourself if boutique audiophile cables are necessary for passing along extremely high fidelity signals.

A problem with accepting that cords and cables improve sound are the exorbitant costs of the major brands.  The benefit/cost ratio is very suspicious for what you are holding in your hands--the cost of the materials and the construction costs are not that much compared to the components you have, yet the retail price can easily exceed your components--a bad good situation that invites a lot of pushback, and it should, but if you ignore costs and consider just the better cables, you would be impressed with the differences in clarity, etc.